Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful means to advertise.
Advertisers have developed several strategies in an attempt to maximize the value of such advertising using the Internet. In one strategy, advertisers use popular presences or means for providing interactive media or services (referred to as “Web sites” in the specification without loss of generality) as conduits to reach a large audience. Using this first approach, an advertiser may place ads on, for example, the home page of the Denver Post Web site, or the particular section of the Wall Street Journal™ site. In another strategy, an advertiser may attempt to target its ads to niche audiences, thereby increasing the likelihood of a positive response by the audience. For example, a company promoting baseball gear might place ads on the Colorado Rockies™ subdirectory of the Yahoo™ Web site. An advertiser will normally determine such targeting manually or using some proprietary method.
Recently, several popular search engines allow placement of ads based on search results by users. Thus, for example, when a consumer uses Google™ to search for a business on Google™'s website, its search engine generates several results including a number of sponsored links. For example, when a user in Arizona searches for “plumbers in Phoenix,” the Google™ search engine may return a number of sponsored links at the top of the page providing information about several businesses that may have paid to be the sponsored companies. FIG. 1 shows a screen shot 10 of such a search result from Google™. As shown in the FIG. 1, the results show such “sponsored links” on the top and right of the resulting web page. Subsequently, if a user clicks on one of these links, such as the link 12 for Donely Service Center™, Google™ is paid by the sponsor of the link 12 for the user's click. Such payment may be $0.10 per click, etc., depending on the arrangement between the link sponsor and Google™. As a result of a user's clicking on the link 12, Google™ may direct the user to a website of the sponsor, such as the website 14 shown in FIG. 2.
However, for the sponsor of such link, there is no guarantee that the person that clicks on that link will actually contact the business, let alone buy something from that business. For example, a user may click on the link 12 to open the website 14, but after that the user may simply click the back-page button 16 to go back to the results of the search as shown in FIG. 1, or the user may click on the close window button 18 to simply close the search. However, whatever is the user's action, in this case the sponsor of link 12 will end up paying to Google™ for a prominent position on the search result page 10 and for user's clicking on the link 12. In this situation, the sponsor may have to resort to special arrangements, such as a special telephone number unique to the link, etc., to find out the real value (i.e., whether the consumer bought any thing from the sponsor's business or contacted the sponsor's business) derived from such payments. Such special arrangements may be costly to the business, especially when the business uses a number of different search engines to promote its business.
Another example of such sponsored links is provided in FIG. 3, which shows the home page 20 of the New York Times™ with several advertising links 22, 24, etc. Here also when a user clicks on one of these links 22, 24, the user is taken to the web page of the sponsor of these links. For example, when a user clicks on link 22, a user may be directed to the home page of Lufthansa™. However, it may be difficult or costly for the business to find out whether, the user that opened the web-site of Lufthansa™, contacted Lufthansa™ or undertook any transaction with the company.
Similar problems are present in other forms of online advertising, such as advertising based on the content of e-mail, advertising based on online purchases by a consumer, etc.
Therefore, there is a need for a better method and system for providing online advertising wherein a sponsor paying for online a advertising has some way of knowing whether the user selecting the advertisement contacted the sponsor.